THE FRENCH CITY OF TROYES is gearing up to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the death of Rashi in 2005.

French town hopes an anniversary will spur interest in a famous son (JTA News)

By Philip Carmel

TROYES, France, July 27 (JTA) � The project is still in the initial planning stages, but the birthplace of the medieval biblical commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac is determined not to miss out this time.

In 2005, Troyes, the ancient capital of the Counts of Champagne in northern France, will celebrate the 900th anniversary of the death of its most famous son, known to the Jewish world by his acronym of Rashi.

The author of the monumental commentary on the Talmud and the Torah, Rashi was born in Troyes in 1040, and although his grave has never been found, scholars believe he died there in about 1105.

For obvious reasons, the town missed out on the anniversary of Rashi�s birth in 1940. The Champagne region around Troyes had as its prefect Rene Bousquet, who later headed the Vichy police and was responsible for numerous roundups of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France.

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Rashi�s family probably came to Troyes from across the Rhine in Germany, and he himself spent some 10 years studying in the Rhineland at Worms in the famous Yeshiva of Mainz, founded by Rabbeinu Gershom, the �Light of the Diaspora.�

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Across the narrow street from the synagogue is the Rashi Institute, which provides courses in Jewish studies and regularly stages conferences.

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By the 13th century, his commentaries on the Bible were being quoted by Christian theologians in Paris. Because Rashi wanted his work to be understandable for the Jews he knew and lived with in Troyes, the style and language of his writings earned him the sobriquet �Hatzarfati,� or �the Frenchman.�

As a result, wherever there is a need to explain a difficult word in the text of the Hebrew or Aramaic in his Torah or Talmud commentaries, Rashi does not hesitate to use his own language. There are therefore almost 3,000 words of 11th-century Champenois French inserted into Rashi�s writing, a valuable source for researchers of the development of the French language.

Despite the fact that Rashi both taught and wrote in Troyes, Samoun said he was almost certainly not the city�s rabbi.

Rather, Rashi, like other medieval scholars, was strict in upholding the talmudic injunction against earning one�s living from teaching the Torah.

In fact, he owned vineyards and was a winemaker � very much in keeping with the Champagne region in which he lived.